Genetic and Environmental Factors Contributing to Parkinson's Disease: A Case-Control Study in the Cypriot Population

Abstract

Introduction: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting a substantial proportion of the elderly Cypriot population. The objective of this study was to evaluate PD risk variants that have been identified previously in Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and to find environmental factors that are predictors for PD onset in the Cypriot population.Methods: A case-control study was conducted with a total of 235 PD patients and 464 healthy controls of Greek-Cypriot ethnicity. Demographic and lifestyle characteristics, exposure to PD risk factors and clinical data were collected. Moreover, 13 previously GWAS-identified PD risk variants were genotyped. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses examined the association between a number of environmental and genetic factors and PD.Results: Multivariable regression analysis revealed that exposure to both pesticides and other toxic substances (P = 0.03), severe head injury accompanied with fainting (P = 0.001), nuts consumption (P = 0.004), red meat consumption (P = 0.02), and soft drinks consumption (P = 0.008) were increasing the risk for PD, whereas cumulative smoking (P = 0.02), and fish consumption (P = 0.02) were decreasing the risk for PD. Five out of the 13 tested SNPs (rs12185268, rs6599389, rs356220, rs13312, and rs17649553) were confirmed to be nominally significantly associated (P < 0.05) with PD risk in the Cypriot population.Conclusions: Collectively, this case-control study has shed some light on the nature of PD epidemiology in Cyprus, by demonstrating a number of genetic and environmental determinants of PD in the Cypriot population.

Clinical Features and Risk Factors of Parkinson’s Disease in a Population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan: A Case-Control Study

“…Our study further revealed that the use of tobacco products is inversely associated with PD. Our findings are consistent with previous reports, which showed that smoking might be protective against PD [26].…”

Head Injury and Parkinson Disease: Updated Evidence from Meta-Analysis Studies

“…After a full-text evluation, a total of 21 case-control studies [2,[10][11][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] met the inclusion criteria. Among these studies, 9 studies carried out in America [10,11,17,18,20,21,22,26,28], 9 studies in Europe [2,16,19,23,24,25,27,31,33]and3 studies in Asia [29,30,32]. Eight studies were published before 2005 [10,11,19,22,25,31,32,33]and 13 afterwards…”

“…Among these studies, 9 studies carried out in America [10,11,17,18,20,21,22,26,28], 9 studies in Europe [2,16,19,23,24,25,27,31,33]and3 studies in Asia [29,30,32]. Eight studies were published before 2005 [10,11,19,22,25,31,32,33]and 13 afterwards [2,16,17,18,20,21,23,24,26,27,28,29,30].…”

“…Table 1 shows the include studies characteristics. We evaluated the quality of the included studies, including those with a score of 7 or above [2,11,16,17,18,20,21,23,24,25,26,27,30,31,32] and those with a score of less than 7 [10,19,22,28,29,33].Quality assessment was presented in the supplementary material (S2 Table). Head injury and PD risk…”

Farming, well water consumption, rural living, and pesticide exposure in early life as the risk factors for Parkinson disease in Iğdır province

“…There is substantial evidence indicating that PD in elderly individuals may have its origin in exposure to environmental factors such as well water, pesticides, and ionizing radiation during early life, including young adulthood. [5][6][7][8][9] Our study population stays in Iğdır, an agricultural region of eastern Turkey, where pesticides have been used since 1960. Interestingly, PD prevalence in Iğdir is higher than that in other regions of Turkey.…”